Opinion

“I just ran it through ChatGPT,” my teammate said, “and this came out.” An online presentation followed. There were no questions.

In the Andrej Karpathy video I shared earlier this quote came up: “You can outsource your thinking, but not your understanding.” I think that’s too optimistic. Human nature is just to optimize for laziness.

AI makes mistakes all the time, or even lies to you, or makes up facts, or is based on outdated information. It’s constantly in the news, and everyone knows it. AI cites an article about a completely fabricated disease. Lawyers showing up with nonsense sources. And yet everyone keeps asking it everything, uncritically, and believing the answer. Because it sounds like a human.

For the insiders Andrej Karpathy needs no introduction, for the rest: Karpathy is among the very best in AI worldwide. He co-founded OpenAI and led AI and AutoPilot Vision at Tesla. He’s also a master at explaining things, and makes really fun and accessible videos on YouTube with titles like “Let’s build GPT: from scratch, in code, spelled out”. Lately he’s mostly focused on everything around LLMs, and he coined the term ‘Vibe coding’, which means ‘programming by just prompting’. You tell an LLM like ChatGPT or Claude what you want, and the LLM makes it for you. A great way for anyone, also non-programmers, to make software for the specific things you want to solve. Low barrier, online.

How and why I built an alternative.

The problem

Nobody seems truly happy with social media. The algorithm feeds you content that makes you angry, your feed is full of people you barely know, and it feels more like a shopping street than a town square: glance at one ad for a few seconds and you’re immediately flooded with ads from ten competitors. Your data is merchandise. It feels gross.

The nostalgia for 2016 makes sense: just your friends’ updates, in order, no AI and all that other noise, back when the word ‘doomscrolling’ didn’t even exist yet.

But nobody uninstalls. Because you’d also lose the updates from your friends: the holidays, the hobbies, the parties, the personal stories. You’re trapped.

I’ve been spending the past few months coding with AI. Here’s what I’ve learned so far.

Design before you delegate

Your own job is to build a smart architecture and data model. Use your unique creative thinking, and your own experience. For example, I never want to deal with timezones, so everything is always UTC until it’s displayed. That’s a decision the AI won’t make for you.

But you can’t plan everything upfront. You will iterate. Sometimes your idea just doesn’t work. This means you need to refactor all the time. It’s ok. Make many small refactors. Don’t wait until big ones are needed.

I’ve been playing with Google+ for a few days now, and find myself thinking: Is this going to be the platform? Are people going to flock to this social network, replacing Facebook and maybe Twitter?

While I was on my bike, riding in the dutch mountains (aka headwind), I thought of a way to look at this, by comparing this to other succesful sites and why they became succesful. I think the reason for the success of many online services is: they make things easier. Easier to communicate, to express yourself, to find things. Let’s look at a few carefully picked examples ;–)